w
w
om
.c
Paper 2 Reading Passages (Extended)
s
er
FIRST LANGUAGE ENGLISH (US)
ap
eP
m
e
tr
.X
w
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE INTERNATIONAL EXAMINATIONS
International General Certificate of Secondary Education
0524/21
October/November 2013
READING BOOKLET INSERT
2 hours
READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST
This Reading Booklet Insert contains the reading passages for use with all questions on the Question Paper.
You may annotate this Insert and use the blank spaces for planning. This Insert is not assessed by the
Examiner.
This document consists of 4 printed pages.
DC (LK) 84682
© UCLES 2013
[Turn over
2
Part 1
Read Passage A carefully, and then answer Questions 1 and 2 on the Question Paper.
Passage A
Natalia has been awoken by her grandfather in the middle of the night and asked to follow him quietly
through the streets of their city during war time.
A Gift
I wondered what my mother would do if she woke up to find us both gone. We were nearing the end
of our street where it opened out onto the boulevard, and I assumed the silence of our walk would be
shattered by the bustle along the tramway. But when we got there, nothing, not even a single passing
car. All the way from one end of the boulevard to the other, every window was dark, and a hazy moon
was climbing along the curve of the old basilica on the hill. As it rose, it seemed to be gathering the
silence up around it like a net. Not a sound: no sirens, no rats in the bins that lined the street, not even
my grandfather’s shoes as he stopped, looked up and down the street, and then turned left to follow the
boulevard east across the square.
“It’s not far now,” he said, and I caught up with him long enough to see the side of his face. He was
smiling.
“Not far to where?” I said, out of breath, angry. “Where are you taking me?” I drew myself up and
stopped. “I’m not going any further until you tell me what this is.”
He turned to look at me, indignant, and said, “Can’t you feel it?” Suddenly his arms went over his head
in a wide arc. “Isn’t it lovely? No one in the world awake but us. You must understand, this is one of
those moments, one of those moments you keep to yourself.”
We passed the empty windows of shops that had gone out of business; lightless buildings
where roosting pigeons hunched along the fire escapes; a beggar sleeping so soundly that I
would have thought him dead if I hadn’t realized that the moment had closed around us, stilling
everything.
Then, suddenly, grandfather stopped in the darkness ahead of me and my chin cracked on his elbow.
The force of the collision knocked me back, but then he reached for me and held my shoulder while
I steadied myself. My grandfather stood on the curb, pointing into the distance of the empty street.
“There,” he said. “Look!” His hand was shaking with excitement.
I peered out into the street, where the long blades of the rails lay slick and shining. There was a tree
on the other curb, a lamp post with a dying bulb, and an overturned bin in the road. I was opening my
mouth to say “What?” And then I saw it.
Half a block from where we were standing, an enormous shadow was moving along the street, going
very slowly up the boulevard. At first I thought it was a tram, but its shape was too organic, too lumpy,
and it was going far too slowly for that, making almost no noise. It was swaying, too, swaying up the
street with an even momentum in a rolling motion that was drawing it away from us like a tide, and every
time it rocked forward, something about it made a soft dragging sound on the rails. As we watched, the
thing sucked in air and then let out a deep groan.
“That’s an elephant,” I said.
© UCLES 2013
0524/21/INSERT/O/N/13
3
Its ears were folded back against the domed, bouldered head with big-lidded eyes; the arched roll of
the spine fell away into the hips; dry folds of skin shook around the shoulders and knees as it shifted
its weight. It seemed to take up the whole street. It dragged its curled trunk like a fist along the ground.
Several meters in front of it, holding a bag of something that must have been enormously tempting, a
short young man was walking slowly backward, drawing it forward with whispers.
Later on, we would read about how some soldiers had found the elephant near death at the site of an
abandoned circus; about how, despite everything, despite closure and bankruptcy, the zoo director
had said, “Bring him in, and eventually the kids will see him.” For months the newspapers would run
a picture of him, standing stark-ribbed in his new pen at the zoo, an advert of better times to come, a
pledge of the zoo’s future. I would remember what my grandfather told me that night, “This is yours.
It belongs only to you.” As we had walked home later, he had added, “You have to think carefully about
where you tell it, and to whom.”
Part 2
Read Passage B carefully and re-read Passage A. Then answer Question 3, which is based
on both passages. Answer on the Question Paper.
Passage B
Below is an account of the discovery of a baby “mamont,” a small mammoth from the Ice Age that was
a member of the elephant family.
A Find
On a May morning in 2007, on the Yamal Peninsula in northwestern Siberia, a Nenets reindeer
herder named Yuri Khudi stood with three of his sons on a sandbar on the Yuribey River, staring at
the diminutive animal corpse. Though they’d never seen such an animal before, they knew it well from
stories their people sang on dark winter nights. This was a baby mamont, the beast the Nenets say
wanders the frozen blackness of their underworld, herded by infernal gods just as the Nenets herd their
reindeer across the tundra.
Khudi sensed his was an important discovery, one that others should know about, but he refused to
touch the animal because the Nenets believe that mammoths are dangerous omens. Khudi knew that
he needed to consult with an old friend named Serotetto, who lived 240 kilometers south and was
better acquainted with the ways of the outside world, so he went there. Serotetto listened to his friend’s
story and then bustled him off to meet with the director of the local museum, who persuaded the local
authorities to fly Khudi and Serotetto back to the Yuribey River in a helicopter.
When they arrived back on the sandbar, the mammoth had vanished.
Mammoths are an extinct group of elephants of the family Mammuthus, whose ancestors migrated out
of Africa about 3.5 million years ago and spread north. The best known is the woolly mammoth, a close
cousin of living elephants and about the same size, which first appeared more than 400,000 years ago,
probably in northeastern Siberia. In fact, the Nenets’ underworld tales are true: the Siberian subsoil
teems with woolly mammoths. At thaw each summer, hundreds of their tusks and other teeth and
bones appear on the banks of rivers and lakes as well as along the seacoast, freed by erosion from the
frozen ground where they have lain for tens of thousands of years. This no doubt helped the botanist
Mikhail Ivanovich Adams recover the first woolly mammoth carcass in Siberia in 1806. About a dozen
other soft-tissue specimens had been found, including several calves ranging in age. Yet no carcass of
any age was as complete as the creature Yuri Khudi had found—and now lost—on the Yuribey River.
© UCLES 2013
0524/21/INSERT/O/N/13
[Turn over
4
Discovering one of these creatures in the preserved state that Khudi had witnessed would create
excitement among modern researchers by offering them the opportunity to examine a mammal that
was now, in fact, extinct. It was imperative that they find the baby mammoth for, with its immense
curving tusks, it contained every answer to their questions in its preserved body. There has been much
debate among researchers about the disappearance of mammoths and large mammal species over
10,000 years ago. Khudi was right that the now missing baby mammoth—its flesh, milk tusks, and
other teeth, all intact—would be of enormous interest to the outside world.
The little mammoth did turn up, propped up against the wall of a shop in a northern seaside town.
It was eerily well preserved and, apart from its missing hair and toe nails, it was perfectly intact.
It was packed up and shipped by helicopter to the safety of the Shemanovsky Museum in Eastern
Siberia.
“Luckily there was a happy ending,” says the director of the St. Petersburg Zoological Museum and one
of the first scientists to view the baby, a female. “Yuri Khudi rescued the best preserved mammoth to
come down to us from the Ice Age.” Grateful officials named her Lyuba, after Khudi’s wife.
Copyright Acknowledgements:
Passage A
Passage B
© ADAPTED: Téa O’Brecht; The Tiger’s Wife; Phoenix Fiction, an imprint of Orion Books Ltd; 2011.
© ADAPTED: Tom Mueller; Ice Baby, Secrets of a Frozen Mammoth; National Geographic Magazine; May 2009.
Permission to reproduce items where third-party owned material protected by copyright is included has been sought and cleared where possible. Every
reasonable effort has been made by the publisher (UCLES) to trace copyright holders, but if any items requiring clearance have unwittingly been included, the
publisher will be pleased to make amends at the earliest possible opportunity.
University of Cambridge International Examinations is part of the Cambridge Assessment Group. Cambridge Assessment is the brand name of University of
Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate (UCLES), which is itself a department of the University of Cambridge.
© UCLES 2013
0524/21/INSERT/O/N/13